The excerpt Mr. Elder chose from “How About Intra-Racial Reparations in South Africa?” is:

“…white South Africans are told to accept their obligation to give up ancestral lands they are alleged to have stolen. Should not the relatives of cannibals who gobbled up their black brethren be held to the same standards?”—ilana mercer

"…white South Africans are told to accept their obligation to give up ancestral lands they are alleged to have stolen. Should not the relatives of cannibals who gobbled up their black brethren be held to the same standards?"—@IlanaMercerhttps://t.co/eiorMTjQsd#reparations

… In the course of defending his reputation against silly, but gravely serious, smears—that he was a “Russian asset,” in the words of former acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe—the president forcefully and publicly berated the Mueller proceedings and his turncoat attorney, Michael Cohen (who, though a hostile witness, testified that there was no collusion).

To Mueller, that paragon of virtue, the dilemma revolved around whether to indict Trump for the fighting words he spoke in defense of his now-proven innocence. Free speech, some might call it. (Remember that quaint thing?)

For in the legal penumbra in which the U.S. Office of Special Counsel operates, aggressively professing your innocence can amount to obstructing “justice.”

Fight an unjust conviction with everything you’ve—and you risk being convicted of a crime.

This is the Kafkaesque, circular reasoning that animates the workings of the U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC): It can criminalize conduct—worse, it can criminalize speech—that is perfectly licit in natural law, such as verbally defending oneself against spurious accusations.

Or, as Attorney-General William Barr put it, “Mr. Trump could not have obstructed justice because HE DID NOT COLLUDE WITH RUSSIA.”

As a scrupulously honest broadcaster, Tucker Carlson recently confessed to “looking back in shame” for having originally supported Kenneth Starr’s independent counsel investigation of President Clinton. (Good libertarians have always opposed the very existence of the OSC. This writer certainly has.)

Another honest man, Democrat Mark Penn, former chief strategist to Hillary Clinton and a frequent guest of the Tucker Carlson show, had “spent a year working with President Clinton” to fend off Special Counsel Ken Starr’s extrajudicial onslaught. Penn had recently remarked candidly that the Starr investigation “was child’s play” compared to the infractions of the Mueller investigation.

Yet, few have been willing to concede that the Mueller inquisition was the Kenneth Starr Chamber by any other name.

The origin of the Star[r] Chamber sobriquet is in 15th-century England.

Meant to remedy injustice in the times of Henry VIII, the “Court of Star Chamber,” as it was known, was soon co-opted and corrupted, becoming “a symbol of oppression” during the times of Charles I.

For reasons obvious, the “Starr Chamber” designation stuck to the outfit run by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr, in1998.

Likewise, there was, seemingly, no limit to the broad remit of Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Other than some accused Russians, nobody stateside dared challenge—from the vantage point of first principles—this draconian medieval inquisition …

To manipulate Americans, politicians have always used the values cudgel.

With respect to immigration, the idea is to impress upon gullible Americans that the world has a global Right of Return to the U.S. Fail to accept egalitarian immigration for all into America; and you are flouting the very essence of Americanism. (Or, to use liberal argumentation, you’re Hitler.)

When a politician preaches about “the values that make our country great,” to quote Mrs. Clinton, chances are they mean multiculturalism, pluralism, wide-swung borders, Islam as peace, communities divided by diversity as a net positive, and the Constitution (it mandates all the above, just ask Ruth Bader Ginsburg) as a living, breathing, mutating philosophical malignancy.

For them, “protecting” the abstraction that is “our way of life” trumps the protection of real individual lives. “We must guard against a weakening of the values that make us who we are,” dissembled Obama in the waning weeks before he was gone. The empty phrase is meant to make the sovereign citizen—you—forget that government’s most important role, if not its only role, is to protect individual life.

In his last few addresses, Obama promised to speak up on “certain issues,” in times when he imagined “our core values may be at stake.” Likewise, in delivering her Control-Alt-Delete speech against the Deplorables, Clinton had asserted that “our country is great because we’re good. … Donald Trump disregards the values that make our country great.” The two’s groupthink, notwithstanding, only individuals can be virtuous, not collectives.

Self-government, and not imposed government, implies that society, and not The State, is to develop value systems. The State’s role is to protect citizens as they go about their business peacefully, living in accordance with their peaceful values. …

… Laws protecting animals are perfectly justifiable, not because [animals] have rights, but because we value their welfare and are repulsed by acts of cruelty against them. Upholding such laws does not require the cascade of nonsense that would ensue from pretending that animals have moral or legal standing.

HENRY STEPHENSON,
O’Fallon, Illinois

I would put it thus:

We care for animals and codify that care in law, not because animals have human rights, but because of our own humanity.

Since compassion for animals is so intimately associated with goodness of character, it may be confidently asserted that whoever is cruel to animals cannot be a good man. – Schopenhauer. (I just love these 19th-C Germans: Wagner, Nietzsche, etc.) pic.twitter.com/c59Rw7fb6e